PROFESSIONAL

Law Firm Leverages Application Virtualization

to Enhance IT Services

“ThinApp allows us to ensure our

users have access to their software Duane Morris LLP
from anywhere and it drastically Duane Morris LLP (Duane Morris), a full-service law firm of more
reduces the turnaround time it takes than 650 attorneys, offers innovative solutions across diverse
us to give them the latest versions
industries in the United States and internationally to address the
of those applications.”
legal and business challenges of today’s evolving global markets.
— Michael Carpinella
Technical Services Director
Trade publications have long placed Duane Morris in the upper
echelon of law firms in terms of utilizing technology. Duane Morris’
K E Y H I G H L I G H TS
clients benefit from the contributions of a professional-level support
Challenge
staff that maintains the firm’s technological and administrative
• Need to simplify application delivery and
infrastructure, which enables the attorneys to focus on providing
maintenance valuable counsel and service to their clients.
• Major software updates can take months
via SMS

• Attorneys need access to multiple versions

of the same software application
• Some of the other application virtualization
solutions require backend servers, which
translates into a significant hardware
investment
Results
• ThinApp makes the latest versions of
software just a mouse click away
• Software updates can be accomplished in a
days rather than months
• Eliminate DLL conflicts, allowing attorneys
to run multiple versions of software side
by side
• ThinApp doesn’t require backend servers; by
using ThinApp with existing hardware, Duane
Morris saved $10k
The Challenge
Given the firm’s history of technological leadership, it was only natural that it would
explore application virtualization as a way to streamline their IT infrastructure.
“We support nearly 200 applications within the firm,” said Michael Carpinella,
Technical Services Director at Duane Morris. “We knew we were moving to a new
desktop in the coming year that would contain the latest versions of all the applications
and thought to ourselves: ‘Instead of spending a significant amount of time visiting
machines and then scripting these applications, wouldn’t it be easier if we could do
this in a virtual environment?”
Historically, the firm had relied on tools like SMS to deliver applications, but these
tools were not without their challenges. “To upgrade a large application like our
document management system could take as long as four to five months, since we
have to schedule the upgrade for a time when the users are not logged in so as to
avoid application conflicts.” said Ritu Anand, Enterprise Systems Administrator at
Duane Morris.
Additionally, Duane Morris needed to make it easy for end users to run multiple
versions of an application simultaneously. “Some of our administrative departments
need to have several different versions of an application—like QuickBooks, for example—
running on their machine to match up with whatever version their clients might be
using.” said Carpinella.

The Solution
Duane Morris evaluated virtualization packages from three vendors and selected
VMware ThinApp as the solution that best met its needs. ThinApp is an application
virtualization solution that allows users to run any version of virtually any application on
a single operating system without conflicts. The entire application and its virtual OS are
delivered as a single EXE or .MSI file.

C U S TO M E R C A S E S T U DY / 1
PROFESSIONAL

“For starters, ThinApp didn’t require a backend server, and it didn’t require agents
for the PCs. When we looked at all the benefits that ThinApp offered—particularly
compared to the other products that were out there—it made sense to move to
ThinApp.” said Carpinella.

The Results
With ThinApp as part of its arsenal, Duane Morris has been able to start virtualizing a
sizable portion of its applications in advance of its move to a new desktop environment.
Having ThinApp has proved invaluable in simplifying application deployment and
administration. “If there is an upgrade, we only have to deploy it in one place rather than
at each PC,” said Anand. “Once I have the EXE file, the software is just a mouse click
away for our end users. Being able to do these updates faster means that our attorneys
can get access to the newest version of their apps quicker.”
Additionally, Duane Morris no longer needs to worry about having multiple versions
of the same application running side by side. “With ThinApp, we don’t have to install
anything on the machine, so we can run multiple versions without wondering if the
machine is suddenly going to stop working because of DLL conflicts,” said Carpinella.
Having applications run virtually doesn’t mean a sacrifice in application performance—
in fact, for the firm’s branch offices and remote workers, it has actually meant a boost
in performance. “With ThinApp, applications run locally rather than from our main data
center here in Philadelphia,” said Carpinella. “When you’re accessing an application locally
as opposed to over a wide area network, the performance is obviously a lot better.”
This ability to deploy applications to remote offices has helped strengthen the firm’s
disaster recovery capabilities. “With the other application virtualization products, we
would have needed backend servers, and if we wanted any kind of redundancy on that,
we would have needed multiple backend servers,” said Carpinella. “ThinApp, on the
other hand, has redundancy built in. I can create a ThinApp of any critical application
and put that onto my file server, which is replicating to my remote locations. If our
network is down here in Philadelphia, our branch offices can still function, since that
application is local to all the remote locations.”
Utilizing ThinApp in this manner has translated into significant cost-savings for Duane
Morris. “If we had gone with one of those application virtualization solutions that
needed a backend server, we would have had to spend $10,000 in hardware,” said
Carpinella. “With ThinApp we were able to leverage existing hardware—the local servers
in each of our remote locations—so there was zero hardware cost.”
Summing up ThinApp’s benefits, Carpinella said: “It allows us to ensure our users have
access to their software from anywhere and it drastically reduces the turnaround time it
takes us to give them the latest versions of those applications.”

The Future
As Duane Morris moves closer to the launch of its new desktop environment next year
it will continue using ThinApp to virtualize applications. “We’re in the early phases of
converting over as many applications as we can for our new desktop,” said Carpinella.
“Until the new desktop launches, we are just going to continue converting as many
applications as we can to the ThinApp platform. It just makes sense for where we’re
heading as an organization.”

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